In the increasingly competitive world of college recruiting, data is gold. The more you know about prospective students and their families and the more efficiently you can use that information, the better your chance of building relationships that lead to your school being their first choice.

Bryan Lester and his colleagues at the Sage Colleges were nearly overwhelmed with data, so much so that they weren't able to take advantage of everything they knew about the students they were trying to recruit. But thanks to a powerful CRM system from TargetX and data integration provided by Informatica -- all via the "cloud" -- Sage is doing a better job of communicating with prospects.

"Data imports and integration are among the biggest challenges we face," said Lester, who is Director of Enrollment Information & Admission Processing for the Sage Colleges in New York. A primary example, he said, is the Common App, which collects enormous amounts of data about prospective students.